A Flushing Meadows Chronicler of Soccer and Immigration

It was a recent Sunday morning and Luis Muñoz was in his usual place, the crowded soccer fields at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. He was not wearing cleats but white orthopedic-style tennis shoes. And he wove among the jerseys not with a ball but with a camera.

Mr. Muñoz, 82, is the last in a long line of photographers who made a career of peddling portraits to the thousands of players, mostly immigrants from Latin America, who flock to this park on weekends.

For 44 years, through the transition from dirt fields to synthetic turf, from film to digital photography, Mr. Muñoz has circled the same acres of land, taking team photos and trailing players who ask for action shots. He has, in the process, witnessed the different waves of Latin American immigration that have swept the borough and, without setting out to, he has documented those demographic shifts.

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Luis Muñoz, right, and Pedro Herrera, a soccer coach, looking over one of Mr. Munoz’s team portraits, which he sells.CreditBryan R. Smith for The New York Times

He has outlasted at least three other such photographers. And Don Lucho, as Mr. Muñoz is known, has a trick for elbowing out newcomers. Though he normally prints his photos at his home studio after the weekend, if an interloper arrives he goes off to his apartment, in nearby Kew Gardens Hills, and rushes back with a sample photo by the end of the match to start taking orders.

“They’ve all left,” he said of his vanquished competition. “They come for a couple of weeks. Then they go. They go to Red Hook, Randalls Island.”

“I’m the only photographer.”

These days, around 100 teams play at Flushing Meadows, according to Dino Dominguez, the president of Estudiantil Soccer League, one of the larger leagues in the park. (That is not including youth teams, which play on Saturday mornings.) When Mr. Muñoz began shooting in the park, around 1971, there were about 10 teams, made up primarily of Ecuadoreans like himself. The players pooled funds for portable goals and a machine to paint chalk lines on the dirt.

Mr. Muñoz discovered the soccer fields after running into an Ecuadorean friend on the street, who asked him to take a photograph of his team. “From that moment, I started taking photos in the park,” he said. During the week, for 30 years, he worked for a shipping company, “and on Saturday and Sunday, I came to the parks.”

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A recent soccer match at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. Around 100 teams play there, a league official said.CreditBryan R. Smith for The New York Times

“I got in, and I never left,” he said.

By 1980, the first soccer leagues had formed and more South American players were arriving — from Colombia, Argentina and Peru, Mr. Muñoz said. Then there was an influx of players from Central America, particularly from El Salvador and Guatemala. Today, he said, “Mexican immigration has overwhelmed everything else. There are nine soccer fields. Ask any player and they’ll tell you they’re Mexican.”

Some of Mr. Muñoz’s photographs hang in Queens. Humberto Lopez, a construction work from Tlaxcala, Mexico, said a photo of his team was “on our wall at home, framed.” Others said they bought them to send back to their wives and parents as mementos of life in New York.

As the sun rose in the June sky, Mr. Muñoz walked from field to field, his eyes shielded by a well-worn mesh hat with the insignia of his hometown team, Sociedad Deportivo Quito. He had not played soccer, he said, since he was a young man in Quito, where his father, a chemistry teacher, taught him how to develop film in a darkroom.

He showed players laminated samples of the digital photos he now prints in his living room. He jotted down orders in a composition book. A player ran by and shouted over his shoulder in Spanish, “I’ll come find you, Don Lucho.”

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Mr. Muñoz, known as Don Lucho, is a known presence in the park.CreditBryan R. Smith for The New York Times

Mr. Muñoz’s busiest period is at the beginning of the season, in early spring, when he can sell as many as 40 team photos in one day, he said. They start at $15 for an 11-by-14-inch print. By the summer, he is taking orders mostly for action shots.

The boundary lines around the fields are painted on the synthetic turf, which was installed a little over a decade ago, instead of drawn with chalk lines. Before, “it was terrible,” Mr. Muñoz said. “There were little tornadoes of dust when it was dry. And when it rained, worse. This was like a skating rink.” But the trouble was not the mess; it was the fighting: With blurred lines, every call could start a melee.

Now, Mr. Muñoz said, there are fixed white lines and three referees per match, instead of just one, and fights have all but ceased. “Sometimes they’d punch the referee, they’d make him run,” he said. “Things have gotten a lot better. They grab the most bellicose and they throw him out and keep playing.” The soccer fields at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park are not the locus of drama they once were. Music plays, children blow bubbles, food vendors pedal bicycles around the fields with plastic bags dangling from the handlebars.

Dino Dominguez, the league president, who has been organizing matches there since the early 1970s, said, “Lucho has been here a long, long time. He walks the fields and they call out to him, ‘Don Lucho, Don Lucho.’ He used to run. Now they’re going to have to put him in a wheelchair.”

As a match ended, and players began to arrive, gathering on the sidelines for their turn, Mr. Muñoz headed over. “All right, gentlemen,” he said, “who wants a photograph?”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: A Flushing Meadows Chronicler of Soccer and Immigration. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe